Representatives from 55 companies were on hand to answer questions and hand out information to a steady stream of current PSU students and recent graduates. Sixty-seven participated the next day at PSU’s annual Career Information Day. Even with some duplication between the two days, the events brought in roughly twice the company representatives as last year.

The Engineering and Technology event drew 800 students. Another 900 attended the following day’s career fair.

“We’re looking for 2,000 full time hires and 1,300 interns to fill spots nationwide,” said Mike Gecan, campus relations manager for Intel. Intel employs 15,000 in Oregon, more than any other business. It hires more graduates from PSU for its Portland-area operations than any other university.

Gecan said Intel is making a big push to hire graduates with software programming experience. He said making personal connections at job fairs such as this is important for the company.

“I take student information and will share it with Human Resources for all of the United States. We avoid saying ‘just look at jobs on our Web site,’” he said.

PSU mechanical engineering major Asgedom Gebrehiwot interviewed with Gecan at the fair.

“I’m looking for any job I can find. A lot of people are hiring; there are more companies here than I expected,” he said.

For some companies, Tuesday’s event was their first appearance at a PSU job fair. One of those was Webtrends, a worldwide leader in Web analytics, headquartered just down the street from PSU. Human resources representative Amy Dobler said she’s looking for software engineers. Although the company has offices in Europe, Asia and Australia, most of the jobs she’s looking to fill are on the West Coast, she said.

Another company looking for new hires was FM Global, a commercial property insurance company that hires engineers for assessing risk.

“I’ve been doing this at PSU for five years, and I’m glad they split off the engineering and technology jobs from the other disciplines. It’s more productive for us because we hire engineers,” said Wayne Fish, a recruiter from the company’s Seattle office. For more information about the PSU Career Center, go to www.pdx.edu/careers.

About Portland State University(PSU)

Located in Portland, Oregon, PSU has about 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students, making it the largest university in Oregon. PSU’s motto is “Let Knowledge Serve the City,” and we provide every student with opportunities to work with businesses, schools and organizations on real-world projects.